I’m very proud of that headline, you know.
Anyway! Waterstones! Kindles! Me! Techradar!
Imagine there’s a serial killer at the door. He’s already killed and eaten the rest of the street, and now he fancies getting his gums on your bum. Do you (a) grab as many sharp things as you can to fight him off, or (b) invite him in but make him promise he’ll only eat one toe?
If you’re Waterstones, the answer appears to be (b).
Here’s an interesting one: a study that suggests Amazon reviews are just as reliable as newpaper ones, for non-fiction at least. I agree entirely, although I reserve the right to edit this post if people start posting one-star jobs…
Although the study points out that there is “virtually no quality assurance” in Amazon’s consumer reviews, which can also be “gamed” by publishers or competitors submitting false reviews, they found that, nevertheless, experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.
Amazon reviewers were more likely to give a favourable review to a debut author, which the Harvard academics said suggested that “one drawback of expert reviews is that they may be slower to learn about new and unknown books”.
Professional critics were more positive about prizewinning authors, and “more favourable to authors who have garnered other attention in the press (as measured by number of media mentions outside of the review)”.
A wee milestone today: I’ve shifted my 25,000th ebook. That’s over 11,000 sales and nearly 14,000 freebies, and it’s almost entirely Coffin Dodgers on the Kindle.
I’ll wait until the end of the month to share the in-depth numbers, but it’s clear that freebie day number two hasn’t had anywhere near the same effect as the first one: while I gave away considerably more ebooks, post-freebie sales have been considerably lower this time around.
There could be all kinds of reasons for that — Amazon changing its algorithm to make post-freebie books less visible; luck; the weather — but I suspect that the main reason is that since Amazon launched KDP Select, more and more people are offering free books, so it’s a strategy that’s subject to diminishing returns. It’ll be interesting to see whether Amazon is creating a market of people who’ll only read free books, or if the freebies are just a nice wee treat for people who buy loads of ebooks.
Anyway. When I finished Coffin Dodgers, I would have been happy if you’d told me a few hundred people had read it. To have it on 25,000 Kindle ereaders and apps is mind blowing.
Yesterday afternoon: Virgin Media and other UK ISPs begin to implement the court-ordered block on The Pirate Bay.
Yesterday evening: various sites publish in-depth guides on how to evade the court-ordered block on The Pirate Bay. In some cases, evading is simply a matter of clicking a single hyperlink.
It’s an old comparison, I know, but the copyright wars are very similar to the drug wars. Nobody really believes the war can be won; the best the authorities can hope for is to make things a little bit more difficult for the users.
When I first got an iPad, I rushed to download some big-name digital magazines. They were rubbish.
You’d think that tablets and magazines are made for each other — tablets are the perfect size, big enough that you don’t spend half your time zooming and scrolling but small enough that they aren’t uncomfortable — and they are, but it’s all too easy to make the reading experience worse than it is in print. For me, too many magazines did just that.
I felt that the digital magazines I tried failed in three key areas: the text; the size; and the return of the interactive CD-ROM.
Text was the biggie. With very few exceptions text on a screen can be tiring to read, and if that text is poorly rendered in the first place it can be particularly sore on the eyes. I found that many magazines exported their text as image files, and in many cases those image files were fairly low-res. After five minutes, my head was bursting.
The second issue, size, is related to that. If you’ve got an entry-level iPad, 16GB of storage fills up fast — so when magazines require more than 500MB of space for a single issue, downloading the latest one usually means having to delete some video or apps first. That is an enormous pain in the arse, and it could well get worse as retina-display assets become more popular. If you think a quarter of a gigabyte is excessive, wait until issues hit the one or two gigabyte mark.
The third issue is the return of the interactive CD-ROM. For a while in the 1990s, interactive CDs were the future of media: you’d get magazines as interactive apps, or training materials published on CD-i. They failed because they were shite: they were all about the bells and whistles, not about the content. Some of the magazine apps I tried reminded me very much of those discs.
The upshot of all this? I’m on my second iPad now and hopefully upgrading to a third-generation one soon, but I’m still not reading my newspapers or magazines digitally. I think, though, that’s about to change. The reason? Aggregators and dedicated magazine apps.
Aggregator apps such as Flipboard and Zite do a very good job of repackaging things that other people are sharing, and I think that Zite is the closest I’ve yet come to having a Daily Me, the personalised newspaper we’ve been promised for so long. It isn’t perfect — its filtering is fairly blunt and its Scotland category is particularly laughable, giving me either sport or the rantings of crazed SNP activists who live in ditches — and it deprives publishers of revenues by stripping all the ads from their content, but it’s pretty good at tech stuff. Between Zite, Instapaper’s recommendations and The Browser’s list of interesting links from around the web, I’ve usually got something interesting to read.
Aggregators are handy things, but one thing they don’t have is a single voice. They can’t do, because they’re collections of many different voices. David Hepworth, founder of Q and publisher of Word magazine, once wrote that a new issue of a good magazine is like receiving a letter from a good friend, and I think there’s a lot of truth in that.
Many of the magazines I write for are like letters from friends, I think, and while I’m clearly biased I think the digital editions of titles such as MacFormat, PC Plus and .net work really well on the iPad. They’re cheap, too, which is a happy bonus. What they don’t offer, though, is interactivity. Tap! does, and it manages to do so without invoking the ghosts of horrible crappy interactive CD-ROMs.
If you’re not familiar with Tap!, it’s a magazine about iPads, iPhones and iPods. Not only does its digital edition run on the iPad, but it’s created on iPads too.
Tap!, I think, gets interactivity right. The app doesn’t make the editor’s head float around the place or annoy you with unnecessary animations; instead, it uses interactivity where it’s actually useful — so you can spin product images to get a better idea of what they look like, or see how a game plays as well as read about it. In the current edition there’s a nifty sliding feature that shows you the difference between the old and new iPad screens, which is a great example of how interactivity can add value when it’s used sensibly.
Here’s a wee video about the current issue:
I think Tap! offers the best of both worlds: the clarity and serendipity of print (it’ll be something special on a retina display), and the benefits of digital publishing (embedded video, interactive elements and so on).
As one of my editors, Dan Oliver, put it this morning on Twitter: “If magazines have a future on the iPad, it’ll be down to people like [Tap editor] Chris & team pushing things on.” I think he’s right: if you have an iPad and like magazines, I think you’ll really like Tap!
I promised I’d share some numbers when I delivered my 15,000th ebook, so here goes. It’s a long post so I’ll split it to keep all the figures off the front page.
An article I wrote for MacFormat has made its way to sister title MacLife, and while it’s been uploaded out of context — it’s one section of a longer article, so some people are mentioned without any explanation of why you should value their opinions  — it’s still full of useful tips from people who’ve sold a lot of books.
For the record, Allan Guthrie is part of the Blasted Heath publisher and has sold more than 50,000 of his own ebooks, and Mark Edwards, along with writing partner Louise Voss, is a Kindle publishing sensation whose chart-toppers have led to an enormous book deal with a traditional publisher.
There are multiple keys to success, Allan Guthrie says. “Getting the covers right, having an edited manuscript, having a properly formatted manuscript, getting the product info right, getting the price right, getting decent customer reviews, informing as many ebook readers as possible about the book – those are all key factors. Sadly, there’s no magic formula.â€
Here’s one for anyone who doesn’t like ebooks: Coffin Dodgers, the dead-tree edition.  I’ve published the book via Lulu.com, and I’ve tried to make it as cheap as possible: it’s £5.24 plus delivery, and I’ll get a whole 21p of that.
I’m on track to deliver my 15,000th ebook tomorrow, and I’ll write a post sharing some numbers and thoughts when I get the chance. The numbers are roughly 10,000 paid copies and 5,000 freebies, with the UK Kindle edition of Coffin Dodgers accounting for 99% of those figures.
Just a wee reminder if you read and enjoyed the book: if you could spare a moment to write a quick review on Amazon, I’d really appreciate it.
Most of the debate over digital music business models is about the record companies and their digital successors, but what about the musicians? David Lowery of Cracker argues that for them, things are much worse: at least some pre-digital musicians actually got paid.
The full thing is long but worth your time:
 Things are worse.  This was not really what I was expecting.  I’d be very happy to be proved wrong.  I mean it’s hard for me to sing the praises of the major labels. I’ve been in legal disputes with two of the three remaining major labels.  But sadly I think I’m right.  And the reason is quite unexpected.  It’s seems the Bad Old Major Record Labels “accidentally†shared  too much  revenue and capital through their system of advances.  Also the labels  â€accidentally†assumed most of the risk.  This is contrasted with the new digital distribution system where some of the biggest players assume almost no risk and share zero capital.
I don’t agree with everything he writes, but that bit there makes sense to me – and it’s being replicated in ebooks. What looks like empowerment can also be evisceration: the Apples and Amazons of the world aren’t getting rid of middlemen, but becoming them by getting writers to do all the work (editing, promotion, etc) that traditional publishers do. They still get a cut, but they don’t have to risk any of their money.
In the last few years it’s become apparent the music business, which was once dominated by six large and powerful music conglomerates, MTV, Clear Channel and a handful of other companies, is now dominated by a smaller set of larger even more powerful tech conglomerates. And their hold on the business seems to be getting stronger.
There’s a wider angle to this too, which I’m sure I’ll come back to in a proper post: the way in which the new titans are organised in such a way that they can destroy their foreign rivals without paying foreign taxes. By routing ebook sales and music downloads through Luxembourg and putting UK earnings through Irish subsidiaries – something that, as public companies, they arguably have to do; their responsibility is to maximise their share prices, not to be good corporate citizens – the new bosses get yet another advantage: not only are they largely free from the need to invest in content creation, but they’re freed from some of the main costs of doing business too.
Lowery:
Taking no risk and paying nothing to the content creators is built into the collective psyche of the Tech industry. Â They do not value content. Â They only see THEIR services as valuable. Â They are the Masters of the Universe. Â They bring all that is good. Content magically appears on their blessed networks.
As I say, I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s hard to argue against that one.